


And For You, I'm True Blue

by boasamishipper



Series: Beyond [2]
Category: Top Gun (1986)
Genre: 1980s, Angst, Established Relationship, Friends With Benefits, Happy Ending, Kissing, M/M, Paperwork, Post-Canon, Pre-Canon, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:33:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21978904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/boasamishipper/pseuds/boasamishipper
Summary: "You want me to meet your parents?"A companion piece/sequel to Lead Me On (To The Other Side). Title from Teena Marie's "Lovergirl".
Relationships: Bill "Cougar" Cortell/Tom "Iceman" Kazansky, Tom "Iceman" Kazansky/Pete "Maverick" Mitchell
Series: Beyond [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1632508
Comments: 17
Kudos: 64





	And For You, I'm True Blue

Most of the others from their class were out at the bar tonight, trading jeers and listening to another one of Nick Bradshaw’s crazy stories, but Bill had invited Tom over to study for next week’s exam. They didn’t get up to any studying — not that he’d expected to, since Tom kissed him almost the second Bill let him in — and Bill enjoyed himself a lot. He was glad he and Tom were on the same page when it came to these meetings of theirs; it saved him a lot of trouble.

They were in bed together after the second round (maybe third, it was all a bit of a blur), Bill on his back and Tom tucked up against his side. Bill wasn’t much for pillow talk, but he didn’t mind listening to Tom, who kept up a steady murmur in between running his fingers over the flat plane of Bill’s stomach, pressing soft kisses to Bill’s neck. Bill wasn’t paying as much attention as he should have — most of his brain was still lost in the pleasurable afterglow of that last blowjob — which was probably why Tom saying something about his parents caught him so off guard. “Your parents?”

“Yeah,” Tom said, and Bill turned onto his side so they could face each other. Tom looked a little nervous, but he was smiling in that open way that made Bill feel vaguely uncomfortable in ways he didn’t understand. “I mean, if you’re up for that.”

“Up for…” Frowning, Bill propped himself up on one elbow. “Sorry, I…I wasn’t listening. What were you saying?” 

Tom’s smile flickered a little. “Well, uh, we’ll be graduating soon. You know. And we’ve got some free time before they send us to flight school, so I figured, uh…maybe you could come out with me to California. Meet my parents.”

“Meet your parents,” Bill repeated. His frown grew more pronounced, as did that vague uncomfortable feeling in the pit of his stomach. “Why would I need to meet your parents?”

Now Tom looked more confused than nervous. “I mean, you don't _need_ to,” he said. “But, uh. I thought you might want to, since…since I don't know when I’ll see you after we graduate. I mean, we’ve been together for a while, so…” He bit his lip. “That’s…that’s how this kind of thing works, right?”

Bill felt his face go red as Tom’s meaning hit home. _Together. This kind of thing._ Jesus, did Tom think… “You think we’re together?” he asked, needing to clarify before that uncomfortable feeling choked him from the inside. “You and me? Like…in a relationship?”

“I…” Tom’s smile faded completely. His voice went tight, a little small. “Yeah. Aren’t we?”

Oh. Oh, fuck.

Bill had been under the impression this thing between them was just physical, just a fun time without strings attached. As in, _We’re friends, we’re attracted to each other, let’s fuck because it feels good and we don’t need it to mean anything,_ kind of fun time. That was why he’d kissed Tom in the first place; they were both stressed from working so hard and he needed to relieve all that stress and tension _somehow,_ and better to do it with someone he knew and liked than some random hooker. He hadn’t seen any harm in what they were doing. After all, they’d both been with guys before, and you couldn’t just be _with_ a guy when you were trying to become a pilot. Or at all. He thought Tom knew that. Hell, if this got weird, he thought he’d be able to call this whole thing off and know that Tom wouldn’t be mad because it wasn’t like it was anything more than sex.

Except going by that look on Tom’s face, he thought this whole thing _was_ more than sex.

What.

Okay, so maybe Tom’s mind worked differently than Bill’s. In Tom’s mind, a friend kissing him and asking Tom to take him to bed, and then having sex with him for weeks, was probably an acknowledgement of ‘something more’, instead of what it really was: an unspoken agreement between two friends who didn’t mind making each other feel good. But Tom couldn’t be that naive.

Or could he? Could Tom actually be _in love_ with him?

(No. Bill refused to think like that. _Love_ wasn’t something that happened or was allowed to happen between two guys, not in his line of work. That was reserved for when Bill stopped messing around and settled down with a woman in a house in the suburbs and had 2.5 kids — his inevitable and not that distant future. He never let himself fall for guys he slept with. He’d thought Tom was the same.)

Dear God. This was a fucking mess. He’d just have to straighten this out. (Well, not straighten; that probably wasn’t the best word for this situation.) Clear up this misunderstanding. That was it. And maybe Tom would get it, and they could keep doing what they were doing without any more miscommunication issues. Bill hoped so. He liked what they were doing a lot.

“Tom,” Bill said, wincing. _Just rip off the Band-Aid, Cortell._ “Look, I…this has been great and all, and you’re a great friend, but…” He couldn’t look at Tom, not when Tom was looking at him like every word was a missile to the chest, so he dropped his eyes to the space of mattress between them. “That’s all you are, man. We aren’t — this whole thing is just…you know. Two friends having fun together, relieving some tension. Casual. That’s all.”

Saying all of that — all of which should have been obvious to anybody who’d been doing this sort of thing for a while — was awkward enough. What was even worse was waiting for Tom to say something back, which took almost an entire minute. And it was one word, so quiet that Bill almost missed it completely. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Bill was expecting — hell, he didn’t know _what_ he was expecting, but Tom getting out of bed was not one of them. Bill sat up. “Wait, where are you going?”

“I should go.” Tom was putting his shirt back on, and sat on the edge of the bed so he could pull on his boxers and jeans. His back was to Bill, and Bill noticed that his shoulders were tense, his words short and clipped. Tom was never this closed-off when they were together. “I still need to study.”

“You don't have to go,” Bill said, a little worried. This whole thing was just a misunderstanding; they could easily work out this new awkwardness. “Come on, Kazansky. It’s fine. Stay a while.”

“No, really. I should go.” Tom finished putting his shoes on and walked across the room, grabbing his jacket from where he’d tossed it on the desk chair. “I just…I’ll see you later.” 

“Tom,” Bill said, and Tom turned around, his hand on the door handle. He wasn’t sure, but in this light it looked like Tom’s eyes were red. His stomach contracted, and Bill did his best to shove that feeling (guilt, it was guilt and he knew it) down and away. “Look, I…you’re not going to tell anybody about this, right? This — what’s been happening is still between us, right?”

There was nothing in Tom’s eyes when he looked at Bill. He was cool, closed-off. Ice cold. “Yeah,” he said, his voice almost catching on the word. “Right. Sure.”

“Okay,” Bill said, relief overpowering his guilt. Tom probably needed a couple days to get over the embarrassment of this whole miscommunication, and then things would go back to normal. “I’ll see you around.”

Tom was gone before he even finished saying the last word.

Despite what Bill had assumed, things never got back to the way they used to be. Tom rejected all further ‘study invitations,’ and Bill started dating one of the waitresses at the O Club. Things were exactly how they were supposed to be.

It was all for the best, anyway.

* * *

When Maverick decided to come back to TOPGUN as an instructor, he didn’t think that the job would include almost as much paperwork as it did flying. Flight records, transfer requests, new student files, tests to grade — it never ended, and he hated the tediousness of it so much more than the reckless hotshot students in every session. At this rate, he was pretty sure his hands were going to be permanently stained with ink before he turned thirty.

At least the end of their latest session was coming up. Jester, maybe on Viper’s orders or his own volition, had taken it upon himself to pop into Maverick’s office a few times a day, every day for the last week to make sure Maverick’s paperwork would be done by graduation. Jester had already come by twice that day — three times if he counted during Maverick’s morning hop — so when someone knocked on his door around four o’clock, Maverick could already feel an ache starting to form behind his eyes. “Come in,” he said wearily, daydreaming about the days when the only time he needed to use a pen and paper was in class to write notes to Goose.

“Hey.”

Maverick’s head snapped up. “Hey,” he said to Ice, who was leaning against the doorframe like he owned the place. “You’re not Jester.”

“Well spotted,” Ice said, a maybe-smile in the corner of his mouth. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah,” Maverick said. “Yeah, sure.”

Ice closed the door behind him and made his way over to Maverick, sitting on an unused space of Maverick’s desk. He raised an eyebrow at the papers and pens scattered everywhere else. “How’s the paperwork going?”

“Don’t ask,” Maverick said, pleased when that elicited a laugh. Ice probably got his paperwork done a week ago, all organized in neat folders with even neater penmanship. “How was the afternoon hop?”

“Boring as shit,” Ice said. “Half of them didn’t want to engage; probably still hungover from whatever they got up to at the O Club last night.”

“Who ended up taking it?”

“Romeo and Zulu.”

“Figures. They’ll probably win the plaque too.”

“Probably,” Ice said, but whatever else he wanted to say was cut off by Maverick (who was tired of pretending to care about small talk) getting out of his chair and kissing him. They were almost the same height when Ice was sitting against the desk, and Maverick could feel Ice’s smile against his lips. He moved forward a little, standing between Ice’s legs, and Ice put his hands on Maverick’s hips, angling forward so they could kiss better.

They broke apart after a while, but Maverick didn’t move back; he just let himself look at Ice, take everything in, and Ice let him. That was another thing that Maverick could do now that they were together — when he was stuck pining from afar and hating himself for it, he used to sneak looks at Ice in the O Club, in the locker room, on the way back from a hop, and now he could look all he wanted.

Sometimes Maverick felt a little punch-drunk, looking at Ice; getting to see the parts of Ice that nobody else ever got to see. Like the scar on his right arm, up near his elbow, that he got from house-training the family cat when he was a teenager. The dusting of freckles on his shoulders. The way he looked in the morning, unfairly beautiful even when he was rumpled and half asleep and wrapped around Maverick. The way Ice would look at Maverick sometimes, when he thought Maverick didn’t notice. He’d almost forgotten what it felt like to be looked at by someone who liked what they saw. 

Ice was looking at him now, but there was something different in his eyes, in the set of his jaw — like he was psyching himself up for something. Maverick frowned. “Hey,” he said, softly. “You okay?”

“Yeah,” Ice said. “Yeah, I’m…” He didn’t finish his sentence; instead, he adjusted himself so he was standing, and moved his hands off Maverick’s hips. “End of the session’s coming up.”

“Yeah,” Maverick said, because he knew that, and he knew Ice knew that. Where was Ice going with this?

“And I…and we’ve been…you know. Doing this for a while now. But I was thinking…”

Ice’s voice trailed off, and Maverick suddenly felt cold all over, like the temperature in the room had dropped by twenty degrees. He’d thought things were great between them — better than great, even — and he thought Ice felt the same way. Did Ice not feel like that anymore? His heart somewhere in his throat, he managed to prompt, “You were thinking…”

(After all, maybe he could still fix this somehow. He _had_ to fix this. Charlie left because of him, Goose was dead and gone because of him. He didn’t think he could handle Ice leaving him too.)

“I was thinking,” Ice said again, and then stopped. He took another breath, and Maverick tried to remember how to do the same. “Maybe if you weren’t busy during the week off, you could come with me to Santa Ana. And meet my parents.”

Maverick stared. “…You want me to meet your parents?”

Ice kept his gaze even, though Maverick could tell it was taking everything he had. “Yeah,” he said. “I want you to meet them.” Then, quieter, “I want them to meet you. To know who you are to me.”

Well, he hadn’t expected that. (That was Iceman Kazansky for him, always throwing Maverick for a loop.) Ice wanted Maverick to meet his parents. And that meant Ice definitely wasn’t breaking up with him — unless this was a test, but he didn’t think it was. Not in that way, anyway.

“You don’t have to,” Ice was saying. His voice was quieter than normal, and he looked uncomfortable — which was not usually how Ice looked. “Not if you don’t want to.”

“No,” Maverick said. “I mean — no, I want to. I do want to. I just…” He dropped his gaze, embarrassed. “I’ve, uh. I’ve never met the parents of anybody I was seeing before.”

“I’ve never taken anybody home before,” Ice said, and Maverick looked back up. He knew Ice had been with guys before, and that Cougar had broken his heart back at NAS Pensacola — which meant Maverick was legally obligated to drop Cougar like a bad habit if he ever saw him again. Anybody who was ever lucky enough to have Iceman Kazansky and then decide they didn’t want him deserved to have their ass kicked. “But you…you want to?”

Maverick’s mouth was very dry. “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, Ice, I want to.”

Ice’s mouth twitched, like he was trying really hard not to grin, but eventually his smile broke loose and spread across his face. Maverick felt himself grin back, like their emotions were linked together by puppet strings. “Alright,” he said. “Great.” His smile turned mischievous. “Though you’re not going to be able to go at all if you don't get your paperwork done.”

“I’ll get it done,” Maverick protested. “I swear Viper and Jester are giving you less than they’re giving me; that’s why you’re done and I’m not.”

“You don’t have that much left to do.”

“Yeah, but some asshole instructor keeps wandering in and distracting me.”

Ice snorted. “Yeah?” He put his hands on Maverick’s hips again, tugging him closer, and Maverick put his hands on Ice’s arms to steady himself. “Do you find me distracting, Mitchell?”

“I was talking about Jester, actually,” Maverick managed, because yeah, he did find Ice distracting, but he wasn’t about to give Ice the satisfaction of saying so.

Ice laughed like he could read Maverick’s mind. “Right,” he said seriously, but his eyes were twinkling as he dropped a kiss on Maverick’s mouth. “Come over tonight?”

Maverick grinned up at him, feeling like he could fly without even setting foot in a plane. “You can count on it.”


End file.
